More than eight hundred dental students in the state of Madhya Pradesh have been declared to have received their admissions illegally by a committee appointed by the state’s high court, following this the committee recommended that these students’ admissions be cancelled. The bench from Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh put the committee together on the 16th of December, 2016 and gave it the task of shortlisting all the students who had been given admission to dental colleges in the state based on their marks in Class 12 board exams and not as per a standardised entrance examination.

What Now?

What prompted this decision was the challenge to the DCI (Dental Council of India) issued by several students. This challenge took issue with the decision taking in cancelling the students’ admissions on the basis of the fact that none of them had taken any form of entrance exam.

More than 800 students were awarded admissions to dental colleges in Madhya Pradesh in 2014. The interesting finding of the committee was that only 15 out of this large number were students who had actually taken the DMAT (Dental and Medical Admission Test) which is organised by the APDMC (Association of Private Dental and Medical Colleges) from the state and had actually secured the necessary qualifying grades.

The Joint Director of Medical Education in the state, Shashi Gandhi, said that the directorate having found this shocking information, will urge the directorate to convey its decision forward to the deans and heads of the colleges that are in question, The order was issued on the previous Friday by the committee. This entire episode has left the students feeling cheated by both the medical education department and the colleges themselves.

A student doing his second year of BDS in Bhopal said that he had applied for the admission on going through an advertisement which mentioned a direct admission to the BDS course. He spoke of how all of his documents were verified by the same directorate of medical education of the state government in the year 2014. He also stated that he was registered properly by the DCI, and asked how he can be held accountable for the irregularity.

Many other students wonder why they are being targeted when it is not them who has committed any fraud or unethical practice, all they had done is trusted advertising or documentation put out by the colleges as well as things spouted by their officials. The DCI was the primary disseminator of information as well as the validator, yet students feel like they are the ones being targeting wrongly. Many wonder what will happen to the time they have lost during the pursuit of their now invalidated degrees.

A student association, The DSWAI (Dental Students Welfare Association of India), has even gone so far as to demand that disciplinary and legal action be taken against the authorities who had accepted the applicants after having verified all their documentation.